“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday afternoon we were visited by my brother Bill and his wife, Ida, from Ontario, NY. We all had a most enjoyable visit—I thought. We usually see them but once a year. But it developed that Jane had one of her most uncomfortable nights in years last night; she woke up often, very stiff, particularly in the dawn hours. She realized that she was reacting to what she’d taken to be all of the negative suggestions and circumstances surrounding Bill and Ida’s lives and beliefs. Later we wished we’d had the presence of mind to get up at dawn, say, when Jane’s more acute discomfort began.

(Jane also through the day received from Seth some material in answer to my remarks at breakfast this morning about the jacket colors chosen for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. The proof arrived in the mail while Dick and Ida were here; we looked at it without much reaction, but still thought about it on other levels a good deal. It lacks what I call good taste, as I’d feared it would, and is too cold and creepy. I for one have long reached the point where I expect little else from Prentice-Hall except shoddy work, and I think that by now Jane more or less agrees. She didn’t like the jacket colors.

They actually represent the ways in which beliefs can dull native qualities of mind and heart alike, so that the intellect seems opaque, and emotional relationships are unduly tangled. Ruburt is working with the nature of impulses, and old ideas about impulses, spontaneity and discipline rose to mind, for the family situation of your brother and his wife almost typifies the kind of situation that Ruburt was determined to avoid. And he thought, what was the entire affair, really, for it seemed to lack any kind of discipline. It seemed to him, with the force of old beliefs, that Ida, Richard and the children were indeed driven willy-nilly by contradictory impulses, and that their lives lack any organizing inner purpose.

He is loyal to your family. He tries to help them, and he tried to deal with his own responses. He tried to rouse William’s intellect and intuitions, but to his utter amazement he found both more dormant than he had expected. Let me clear the issues. Generally speaking now, Dick and Ida seldom followed their own impulses; no matter for example how impulsive Dick might have seemed at times in the past. Both of them distrusted the self to a far greater degree than either of you ever did, so that the fine grains of originality were dulled in all areas of their lives.

His behavior, however, led him of course to quite powerful emotional outbursts, which frightened him. Ida married him because she believed his educational status, and his Anglo-Saxon background, meant a step upward for herself and her children. She did as she was told, for many years.

(Pause.) You have always been a hero, and yet a mystery to your brother Dick, a source of pride and yet of embarrassment. He considers studying dreams feminine, and to paint pictures of them presents a second mystery (intently). His own buried intuitional abilities, however, have always acted as a bridge between you, so that he feels a close affinity that he does not understand. He feels some affinity to Ruburt for the same reason, but Ruburt also upsets him, because he disapproves of women who think, and is very frightened because Ida in later years has started to criticize some of their joint beliefs.

Ruburt wrote a poem yesterday morning (Thursday), considering it afterward briefly, wondering whether it was really good enough to type as it was, throwing off in an odd moment a thought, a concept that would represent the highest revelation to Ida, if she could understand what it means.

Ida and Dick both believe to a far greater extent, again, than you two ever did, that the self is unsavory and dangerous. Ida was afraid to see the psychologist again, for fear that therapy would throw up evidence of this feared evil thing, and Dick is afraid of writing poetry again lest the intuitions upset his life. He used meditation as a tranquilizer to dull his senses and mind, and not for understanding himself. Ruburt’s impulses gave birth to his poetry, to his writing, and to the freedom of his intellect and the heavy-handed discipline has always been impeding.

He felt partially helpless, realizing that neither Dick nor Ida read the books. He wanted to improve physically before their eyes, in a flash of a moment, to show them physically that it could be done. All of this caused muscular tensions, but he was appalled at what he considered Dick and Ida’s laxness in so many areas, and it seemed that that was the natural human condition, so that you must exert great discipline to keep yourself aloft from it. It is not the natural condition of the species to begin with, and naturally (underlined) neither of you were that way. The truer you are to yourselves, and to your natural impulses, the less you will be that way (intently again).

(10:43 PM. Jane laughed. “I noticed that my voice cleared up as soon as I started the session.” Almost, at least, I said. Then Jane added: “I just got that he’s going to devote part of another session, a private one, to beliefs people have about old age. Because of the meeting with Dick and Ida....”